Under the Sun

I've spent the greater part of the weekend trying to form a backbone for a relatively short paper (8-10 pgs) that really should only take about a day to write. For some reason I'm one of "those people" who want to do more with their schoolwork than just the bare minimum. It's for one of my political theory courses so all I need to do is write about one of the theorists we've covered in the course (Hayek, Marx, Locke...), or one of the concepts (conservatism, liberalism, freedom...). It could be as simple as a book report, but I realized after I checked 17 books out of the library (not all at once!) and culled about 20 articles from JSTOR that what I was actually trying to do was be original. I want to have a hypothesis or just plain thesis that is my own and not just "a mediocre copy of another man's genius." It really does feel like there's nothing new under the sun and that I'm just banging my head against the wall. What on earth would someone like me be able to posit that 100s of other people hadn't said 100s of times before. Especially for an assignment so minor. Why am I still trying?

You'd think that being married with a Sam would make me want to just do the bare minimum that will get me out of school as fast as possible, but that's not what I'm finding at all.